ActivityPub for GNU Social GSoC

Congrats to Diogo Cordeiro on getting a GSoC internship this summer to add ActivityPub to GNU Social! And thanks to GNU Social maintainer mmn-o for mentoring!

GNU Social is a social communication software used in federated social networks. In a federated social network user data stays in user's server instead of a centralized one. Given that, standards were created in order to make the communication between different softwares in a social federated context possible. ActivityPub is the newer and covers parts out of OStatus's specification, namely the app/client development. Because of this and other benefits, GNU Social is looking forward to support this new protocol. The project idea aims at developing a plugin (as GNU Social is true to the Unix-philosophy of small programs to do a small job) that will implement the ActivityPub Protocol in GNU Social.

Let's do a little experiment. It's obviously biased by my relative participation in each, but I'm comparing the reach of twitter, facebook, Diaspora, pump, G+, and GNU Social (plus anything that can talk directly to it...that is not via NavierStokes).

Please like this if you see it. Obviously, if you want more people to like it, then you share it, but I'm only going to count likes.

What's interesting is that on Diaspora, pump, and GNU Social, I all got actual comments about how the study was being conducted. I got literally zero comments on twitter or G+. There's all sorts of bias in this, but I have more "friends" on facebook by an order of magnitude and significantly more on twitter than the free platforms. So, it seems like people join the proprietary networks and just don't use them very much.

With easter being on April Fools' Day I suggested mixing in empty eggs and others with exploding dye packs. But they didn't like the ideas. I thought it would have been hilarious. Open the wrong egg and you get either nothing or *POOF* it explodes all over you.

Gimp 2.10.0 RC 1 is out!

The amount of fixes and new features is great, but this post isn't about that... =)

If you happen to start this new Gimp and are, like I was, horrified by the look, know that in the preferences you can still choose the "System" theme which will probably make it look like you had it before. It certainly did for me, using my Oxygen widget theme and my own (dark) custom colors.

Same thing with the icons, which now seem to default to a monochrome/symbolic set (because that's the current supercool fad, right?), but you can still select the classic theme, plus now you can set their size!

more than anything else, my opinions on Firefox telemetry have been influenced by my work on pump.io. people whine about it "phoning home" but honestly it is so painful to ship stuff without that kind of insight. I suspect lots don't understand just how much it impacts the product quality.

One of Chrome's big advantages over Firefox is they're much less skittish about telemetry, so Chrome devs can spend their time optimizing the exact scenarios that people experience. Firefox devs have to guess which things need optimizing, so even if they make something 100× faster than Chrome, if it turns out that particular circumstance doesn't show up very much, that's wasted effort.

It's pretty frustrating to read comments on HN or wherever that say things like "I like Firefox's stance on privacy, but it just never feels as snappy as Chrome".